I thought the problem was too many workers
Exactly one week ago I blogged about the inflow of Hispanic workers — including illegal immigrants — into New Orleans. The implication in the stories cited in that post was that these workers were crowding out employment opportunities for locals. So imagine my surprise when Gary Rivlin reports in the New York Times that this ...
Exactly one week ago I blogged about the inflow of Hispanic workers -- including illegal immigrants -- into New Orleans. The implication in the stories cited in that post was that these workers were crowding out employment opportunities for locals. So imagine my surprise when Gary Rivlin reports in the New York Times that this is basically a crock of s**t:
Exactly one week ago I blogged about the inflow of Hispanic workers — including illegal immigrants — into New Orleans. The implication in the stories cited in that post was that these workers were crowding out employment opportunities for locals. So imagine my surprise when Gary Rivlin reports in the New York Times that this is basically a crock of s**t:
Burger King is offering a $6,000 signing bonus to anyone who agrees to work for a year at one of its New Orleans outlets. Rally’s, a local restaurant chain, has nearly doubled its pay for new employees to $10 an hour. On any given day, contractors and business owners pass out fliers in downtown New Orleans promising $17 to $20 an hour, plus benefits, for people willing to swing a sledgehammer or cart away stinking debris from homes and businesses devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Canal Street, once a crowded boulevard of commerce, now resembles a sparsely populated open-air job fair. Ten weeks after Katrina, government officials and business leaders worry that a scarcity of able-bodied workers is hampering the area’s recovery…. Virtually every New Orleans business confronts the same conundrum: In a city without a functioning school system and with vast stretches that are still uninhabitable, where will they find the employees they need to begin the long recovery? Everyone from bank presidents to restaurant owners to the Port of New Orleans are approaching the task like a nurse in an emergency room performing triage on patients based on the most immediate need…. Like other businesses, Bollinger Shipyards has dispatched emissaries to shelters around the South, looking for displaced residents willing to return. For the moment, though, evacuees who are living free in a hotel or in a subsidized apartment while collecting a stipend from the Federal Emergency Management Agency may not have the same pressing need to return to the stricken city as they might otherwise. Bollinger employees made 20 or so trips, but they did not sign up a single evacuee. Mr. Bollinger has yet to bump up his pay scale but he said that raises were inevitable.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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